Tract
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The hand writes stairways
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stairs, my steps are guided in the half-light by the very nature of
its construction; the succession of its planes leads me, skirting a
narrow emptiness, toward its hidden heart.
The poem is a submerged building.
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The steps seek out my feet. The spiral inspires my steps.
There is no effective ascent or descent, only an exasperated
wandering along the abyss’s black periphery.
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Sometimes my eyes, unastonished, read numbers written on the
wall, their intermittent progression empties them of meaning.
I’ve lost their semantic key: the only thread keeping me tied to
sanity is knowing that I am dreamed.
I brush the trembling handrail. My fingers grope the darkness
beyond.
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The poem is a submerged building, concatenation of bare rooms
that the light just barely penetrates. The stairway, like the tunnel’s
vault, like the viscera that joins one darkness with another, a tract
that leads nowhere.
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Panic threatens to shatter the dream. Plunged in a spasm of
blackness, dragging with it dead leaves, knowledge, lived
experience.
The viscera expels its incomprehensible fluid, hoping for
revelation,
light fed by shadows. My hands receive silent prayers:
I touch the words, I can seize their shapes, now viscous, now
crystalline.
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No sound evokes in my heart the perfect sound.
The most beautiful vowel, the most intense vibration:
Echoes of an ancient geography, of archaic animals crawling on
the forest floor, a bird’s call stifled by the thick silence. The rain
strikes, a caustic odor emanates from the undergrowth. A tangible
smell.
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I’ll say it again:
the poem is a submerged building. Wind, rocks, trees,
marine light surround its architecture. The handrail vanishes,
becomes shadow.
The poem is an open parenthesis before the plunge.
Revelation of flight.
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Crown >Stem >Roots
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1
you were dying >we reorganized
life >they cut
the poplar grove by the river
stacked the wood
in the ditch > so many years
growing for nothing
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__
you slowly burned the ring
of snow had grown
none of us knew
why
one after another the large
stones had fallen away
you gravid > your branches
scored the earth
the scar cuts through us
we’re left with the smoke
in our voices > feeble chorus
only smoke we sing
we couldn’t understand > smoke
drowned without recourse
since childhood your face
had burned > solemn flame
your hands fulfilled the silence
until now the fire
is yours >the smoke
remains blind within us
only smoke we sing
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2
you live too
stooped >dangerous for
a man >rain has shaped you
mud grounds you > ice
introduces a cry >wind
your children fall > impotent
mutilated you can’t redeem them >your hands
in cinders kiss your forehead goodbye goodbye
they fall before your feet
too far from the arch
traced by your arms
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a slight trembling an absence of
nothing
has begun
an emptiness fearful of
nothing
a convulsed propensity to
nothing
shuddering with
nothing
to the rear of
nothing
vibration previous to
nothing
terrifying dread of
nothing
the first drops have fallen
summoning dust to dust
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3
your body always smells
fresh after the felling
redeemed of the years of pain
never suffered >confronted
beneath your skin the larva
another life in another place
in you but so far away
extreme dimensions are
crown >stem >roots
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systole sonata your fingers
a C sharp
C Ludwig forever
forever C Franz
C Johann
contrary to breath death
will be powerless
C Ludwig
C Franz
so deep in you >heart
his is buried
to drag it toward oblivion
forever C Johann
C Franz > death
will be powerless
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4
around you > only
our clumsy footsteps
a childhood
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Hyena
I detach myself from the dream like an old skin,
open my eyes it’s another world
my eyes are others, my gaze
is no longer plunged within me,
it soars above me.
In the distance I see my hands
they form a hollow, they take water from my soul,
and drink.
My hands teach me to sing.
I’ve cured the wound in the dead body.
My hands teach me to sing.
I burn for entire nights, smoke rising
from my chest to envelop the walls
of my home
losing myself in the clouds in the sky.
The smoke obliterates the meaning of days.
I’ve seen my death through your eyes
animal, your claws my hands,
the heart intones its heartbeat,
we are a single root
it has pierced the joy in mystery.